v0.13.0 - Auto Mode
🎉 What's New in v0.13.0
This is the Auto Mode release — a brand-new AUTO mode that continuously decides whether to heat, cool, dehumidify or run the fan on your behalf. Set it once and your thermostat keeps the room comfortable through changing seasons and weather, without you ever swapping modes by hand.
✨ New Features
🤖 Auto Mode — set it once, let it decide
Select AUTO and the thermostat continuously chooses the right action — heat, cool, dehumidify or fan — based on what the room actually needs.
Instead of manually switching between heating and cooling as the day and seasons change, Auto Mode evaluates the room every cycle against a clear priority ladder: safety first, then urgent humidity or temperature, then normal comfort, then a gentle comfort fan, then idle. It only changes what it's doing once the current goal is met or a more urgent concern appears — so you won't see it flap back and forth between modes.
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Available automatically on any system with at least two of {heater, cooler, dehumidifier, fan} — single-purpose systems are completely unchanged
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See exactly why Auto Mode picked each action: three new reasons (priority humidity, priority temperature, priority comfort) appear on the
hvac_action_reasonattribute and the diagnostic sensor — perfect for dashboards and automations
🌡️ Smarter cooling with outside temperature
Auto Mode now uses your outdoor sensor to react faster — and to cool for free whenever it can.
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When there's a large gap between indoor and outdoor temperature, normal heating/cooling is promoted to urgent so the room recovers more quickly
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When it's cooler outside than inside, Auto Mode prefers running the fan over the air conditioner — "free cooling" that saves energy
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Tunable via the new
auto_outside_delta_boostsetting (default 8 °C / 14 °F) under options → advanced settings -
Details: #580
💧 "Feels-like" temperature for humid days
On muggy days, cooling can now respond to how hot it actually feels — not just the dry thermometer reading.
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With a humidity sensor configured, enable
use_apparent_tempand Auto Mode's cooling decisions use the NWS heat index instead of raw temperature — so a humid 25 °C is treated like the warmer temperature it feels like -
A new
apparent_temperatureattribute exposes the calculated value; your displayedcurrent_temperaturecontinues to show the real sensor reading -
Details: #581
🐛 Bug Fixes
🌀 Fan now works on heat-pump and heater-only setups
If you configured a fan entity on a heat-pump or heater-only thermostat, the fan was silently ignored — FAN_ONLY mode never appeared. It does now, so you can run the fan independently of heating and cooling.
🔌 keep_alive no longer turns devices on while OFF
A serious safety bug is fixed: with keep_alive configured, the heater or cooler switch could turn itself on while the thermostat was set to OFF, whenever the room temperature drifted away from target. The keep-alive timer now only enforces the OFF state and never runs heating or cooling logic while the thermostat is off.
Example: You set the thermostat to OFF for the night. Before this fix, a cold room could quietly switch the heater back on. Now OFF means OFF.
🧹 No more duplicate sensor errors for UI-configured thermostats
Thermostats set up through the UI logged a "Platform does not generate unique IDs" error on every Home Assistant restart, leaving an orphaned hvac_action_reason sensor that couldn't be deleted (no device, no area, greyed-out "Delete" button). The sensor is now registered exactly once.
📊 By the Numbers
- 3 new features — Auto Mode priority engine, outside-temperature bias, feels-like temperature
- 3 bug fixes — fan on heat-pump/heater, keep_alive OFF safety, duplicate sensor registration
- 1518 tests — all passing
- 100% backward compatible — no configuration changes needed
🔄 Migration Guide
Drop-in replacement. No configuration changes required. Existing thermostats behave exactly as before — Auto Mode appears only on multi-capability systems, and you opt into it simply by selecting AUTO. The outside-temperature and feels-like behaviors only activate when you've configured an outdoor or humidity sensor and turned them on.
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Full Changelog: v0.12.0...v0.13.0
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